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I don’t run many regression analyses these days, but the economist in me can’t help but feel a sense of schadenfreude at the recent economic troubles in the West. I think this is mostly because the problems with subprime loans and the housing market have been fairly obvious since 2005 and there’s no excuse for competent investors to lose billions of dollars.

That being said, I won’t join the chorus slamming Bernanke for throwing emergency loans at Wall Street. It would be nice if there were a way to force financial institutions to realistically appraise their paper-based assets, but I can’t see it. Which leaves the United States and those of us who depend on it’s continued existence lucky that American monetary authorities don’t subscribe to the same sort of zero-inflation zealotry that wreaked havoc on Canada in the early 1990s, especially now that sane fiscal policy is AWOL and Bernanke and the Fed are the only things left between us and illiquid lending markets.

Given that Fed-fuelled liquidity is flooding into commodities markets worldwide and aggravating China’s institutional problems with inflation, I was interested to run across two statistics on the Chinese economy last week that provide some rough endposts for figuring out how inflation is playing out against growth where it really matters: the pocketbook of ordinary people here. The first statistic involved the cost of real estate, which is now apparently a 30 year investment measured in monthly rental costs. To put that figure in perspective, this number was around 14 years in the United States prior to the 1990s and climbed to 20 or so during the recent housing boom. Real estate is really expensive here!

China doesn’t have the same problem with subprime loans that the United States does for obvious reasons: there aren’t any low-income mortgage products in the country. This basically makes housing ownership the reserve of the upper-middle class, or those whose legacy housing has been provided or subsidized by their danwei. Since there is not much of the latter happening these days, most ongoing real-estate investment is being made by the upper classes or by major corporations who’ve clued into the reality that building real-estate - even useless and unoccupied real estate - is a great way to increase corporate book value.

With flooding liquidity and rising energy costs pushing up inflation, this all leads to a pretty fundamental question: which is rising faster in China, the real income of the people or price inflation? According to 厉无畏, an economist with the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, we now have some figures on inflation levels in 2007 that set a baseline for figuring this out. Li suggests that inflation was:

4.8 percent in commodity prices

7.8 percent in consumer prices

I’m skeptical that the figures are actually this low since local papers are reporting inflation rates in the double-digits, and pork has soared by as much as 60 percent. Increased oil prices are also pushing up transportation costs significantly. That being said, here’s the annotated Xinhua article for those who like to read government news as close to the source as possible. And regardless of the actual figures, the important thing is really the number against which we have to set this figure: nominal growth in income. The authorities are reporting a 6 percent increase in per capita income in rural areas, and 12 percent nominal gains for urban residents.

What do I think? If these numbers are remotely accurate, they’re really not that very far apart, especially when you realize that wage growth is going to be lagging behind income growth. My instinct is that rural communities are already falling behind, and that urban communities are getting ahead, but that inflation is significantly underreported nationwide and that a lot of the income gains are tied directly or indirectly to unsustainably high prices in real estate.

UPDATE: just found this before going to bed. Claims GDP growth of 8% per year and CPI growth of 8.7% per year. Pretty depressing.

Tags: economics, inflation

Now that the Beijing Olympic Committee has finished cracking down on non-licensed fuwa, maybe they can send a team over to Sohu.com to break some kneecaps. The mega-portal appears to have been caught with its pants down stealing flash games from independent (read: poorer than BOCOG members) games designers:

Here’s the story more-or-less in full from its source: The Pencil Farm. You can click on the link there for more details including some hilarious screen comparisons showing the harmonious pro-Olympics version of the game side-by-side with the original.

The Olympics stole my game.
They downloaded the swf file from my site, decompiled it, swapped out the little guy for the Fuwa characters, took my name off of it and republished it as their own. I can tell this is what happened because they are still using some of my original art from Snow Day (the clouds and the ice cube are exactly the same). I also took the liberty of decompiling their game and actually found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren’t being used in the Olympic version. It even still has the splash sound effect from The Lake (I used the engine from The Lake to make Snow Day and must have forgot to delete this file).

Two of the other games on the Olympic site are obvious rip-offs of Ferry Halim’s Orisinal games. Compare Obstacle Race on the Olympic site with Ferry’s adorable Arctic Blue, and Leap and Leap, a clumsy copy of Winter Bells. I can’t really tell if these are clones or reskinned versions of Ferry’s files, but those stars in Leap and Leap look pretty damn similar to me.

I did some research and it seems that the web site was created by Sohu.com, the company that last year busted Google for plagiarizing from one if its products. At the time Sohu made three requests of Google: that they stop offering the software for download as quickly as possible, that they make an apology, and that they discuss compensation for the offense. I’m currently considering my legal options, but I think these three things sound like reasonable requests to make of Sohu.

The Beijing Olympic Committee has also not been lenient with copyright infringers. Back in October the director of the State Intellectual Property Office, Tian Lipu, pledged to prevent Olympic piracy. Indeed, the Olympic web site even has a page set up where you can report infringement of intellectual property rights. Evidently, they are slightly less concerned when The Olympics infringes on the rights of others.

This is several times more delicious than when Hanban pirated foreign media content for its boondoggle of a Chinese-learning website. I’m personally indifferent to the Olympics as an event (running and jumping aren’t high on my A-list of activities that should be state-subsidized), but a full year of stories like this is just the sort of thing that could make me a convert.

Bizarre entries from the Linguistic Data Consortium still surface every now-and-then like sea creatures from the deep. The latest I noticed was a surprising definition for 深入研究. The dictionary had it as “lucubrate”, which WordNet defines as “to elaborate on”.

True to form, both Dict.cn and Kingsoft appear to have copied the entry wholesale without lucubrating too much over accuracy or attribution. Still, a definite step-up for them from the depths of “nigger-brown“.

What do people feel about switching the output of the “popup annotation” (the default output from the Adso home page and the popups on newsinchinese.com to a more comprehensive definition (something that includes all of the glosses in the database)? Right now Adso chooses the most likely definition/pos given its understanding of Chinese grammar. I’m not sure that most people notice this selectivity until the system actually gets something wrong….

The reason the system is built this way is that Adso aims to offer gist translation and other sorts of generic semantic analysis functionality. Being able to hone down a word to a single definition is much more useful for search/semantic/translation applications than just showing a list of possible definitions. I strongly believe that structuring data in a way that enables this is important for the ability of the open source community to innovate in the long-term in this space.

But maybe this is the wrong approach for data-display, and especially for a project that aims to make it easy for people to collaborate around language. I’ve noticed that a lot of users (especially new contributors) like to pack multiple definitions into the popup windows rather than add new ones. I usually edit these during the review process, but don’t want people to feel disappointed if their edits “disappear” from one release to the next, especially if they aren’t really gone, but merely restructured. Also, if people really WANT more comprehensive definitions when they use an annotator, it is easy enough to change the system and get Adso to produce that sort of output. It’s actually much faster to do as well since this eliminates the hard work of grammatical disambiguation.

Curious if anyone has any thoughts on this, especially since the next review is coming up fast and it looks as if we’ll have more than a thousand new submissions.